Neighborhood electric vehicles, NEV, such as the ZENN are gaining popularity and making sense for many who only need a local car for grocery shopping or city hops. Those cars are economical, easy on the wallet and make sense as a second car, while for some retirees, make sense as a main car.
The gist is that if NEVs are great additions to your garage, ZENN is probably making the most hoopla in the media these days. It has a fairly affordable NEV that meets most people’s expectations of an electric city dweller. But ZENN is also intricately meshed with an ultra-secretive ultracapacitor company called EEStor. While other companies work on refining ultracapacitors, EEStor so far has shown very little but press releases. So what is going now?
Sorting Through The Hype. If you believe ZENN, EEStor has a revolutionary ultracapacitor that will power its NEVs. The problem is that no one has seen it, let alone tested, as far as we know. The latest press release adds to the confusion, through a highly technical release talking about parts of its technology but still offering no real substantial takes.
In The News. Reuters takes a stab at the beast and writes:”…confirmed test results for U.S. partner EEStor Inc’s potentially ground-breaking battery and now plans to boost its stake in the battery technology developer.” How was it confirmed? AutoBlogGreen tries to decipher what the release says: “EEStor ultracapacitor had passed independent tests that showed it had a relative permittivity of 22,500…” It concludes that test have been made and if you can sort out the technical details, ZENN will give EEStor another $700,000 U.S.. Independent tests? Please tell us more.
In conclusion, one obvious palpable result is that ZENN’s stock price jumped, according to BusinessWeek. The problem in these “troubled” times is that any news can be turned into good news with a little careful wording and enough technical jargon. In the end, we are still no closer to see what EEStor does differently from Maxwell, nor do we have more information on these independent tests. We feel somehow, these press releases add more to the confusion than actually benefit the EV community, something we can all ill-afford to have at this stage.